You know, the most amusing thing about the last 48 hours or so has been the emergence of Alastair Campbell as spinner-in-chief against Damian McBride. It’s most odd because most of the things Damian writes about in his book confirm all the things that Alastair says in his diaries (of which I am a massive fan). In fact, before I go on, let me say that I really like Alastair and this blogpost is not intended to be an attack on him. But he has attacked the book and I will damn well defend myself, my company who published it, and my author who has written what I believe is one of the political books of the year. So here goes.

In an article in today’s Guardian he lays into Damian and suggests that the book will be a massive flop. Well, everyone is entitled to their opinion, but I would say that a book which reaches Number 6 in the Amazon Hot 100 5 days ahead of publication won’t do too badly. Our Politicos.co.uk and Biteback sites have taken several hundred orders (it’s cheaper than Amazon’s price) and on Wednesday it will be in all Waterstone’s stores and hundreds of independent bookshops. This is what Alastair says in The Guardian…

Campbell said he believed that McBride’s book, Power Trip, would sell no more than 5,000 copies.

Well, according to Bookscan, this is what the three volumes of Alastair’s diaries have sold…

Alastair Campbell Diaries Volume I: Prelude to Power – 9,773 copies in HB
Alastair Campbell Diaries Volume II: Burden of Power – 2,803 copies in HB
Alastair Campbell Diaries Volume III: Power and the People – 1,739 in HB

Alastair points out on Twitter that perhaps the best comparison would be with The Blair Years, which sold massive amounts, although I haven’t got the actual figure. That was the volume which left out any embarrassing bits for Labour. It was fascinating stuff, nevertheless, but as a reader I felt rather cheated that the controversial bits had been omitted.

His main beef with Damian’s book is that we sold the serial to the Daily Mail and that it is being published to coincide with Labour’s conference. Like Tessa Jowell, he seems to think Damian owes something to Labour. I cannot understand why. Damian was a civil servant before becoming a Labour employee. When he resigned he was unceremoniously spat out and dropped by the Labour hierarchy. Ed Balls, so far as I know, was the only one to show Damian the milk of human kindness.

The fact is that most political memoirs are published to coincide with party conferences. There’s no conspiracy. I publish books when I think they will get most publicity and most sales. It would be a bit odd for a publisher not to. Alastair says he is not going to read Damian’s book. That’s a shame, because whatever he thinks of him personally, he would find it a truly fascinating political narrative. It’s a book which really does tell what it’s like to be, as Richard Nixon might say, ‘in the arena’. It will shock, it will horrify, it certainly plays into the hands of those who think that all politics is visceral. But above all it is totally honest. And I think that is what will come through when the book reviews start to be written.

I have no idea how Damian’s book will sell. Serialisations can often kill book sales if people think they have read it all in the newspaper. However, in this case the Mail are printing 15,000 words of a book which contains 140,000 words. But I am optimistic. Political memoirs rarely sell more than a few thousand copies, but this is so much more than a political memoir. We’ll see if that message gets through.

Tomorrow I’ll write a post explaining how newspaper serialisations work, because there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding about who controls what. And I will also tell the truth behind this ridiculous article from The Guardian. They reckon they know the ins and outs of how I sold the serialisation for Damian’s book. They really don’t, as will become clear tomorrow.